On 8 Dec 2003, at 22:12, Stas Bekman wrote:
>>> No, I want to be able to link to the distribution dir, e.g.:
>>> http://search.cpan.org/~lds/CGI.pm-3.00/
>>> without that -3.00 version in the path, so it'll always point to the 
>>> latest distro.
>>>
>> Actually, it does work <http://search.cpan.org/~lds/CGI.pm/>, or is 
>> this not what you meant?
>
> I didn't know that (it's not obvious). But what if the author changes? 
> There should be a way to say that without including the author name.

   /dist/ as I pointed out in another message

> Also CGI.pm is bad example, as it has .pm in its name and you need to 
> know that its distro includes that .pm string. Let's take 
> Apache::Request as a better example. I want to be able to say:
>
> http://search.cpan.org/whatever?Apache::Request and expect to be taken 
> to the distro dir that contains the latest version of the package, 
> which is at the moment: http://search.cpan.org/~joesuf/libapreq-1.3/

It was not clear that is what you were trying todo. You want to link to 
the dist page by giving the name of a module in the dist. search 
currently cannot do that

> So in documentation pods one can say something like:
>
>   When you use Apache::Request
>   (L<http://search.cpan.org/whatever?Apache::Request>) bla bla...
>
> and the user clicking on this link will be taken to
> http://search.cpan.org/~joesuf/libapreq-1.3/
> and from there he can decide to read the docs or download the distro 
> or do other things.
>
> That URL in my docs will always work correctly even if the author or 
> version numbers change.
>
> I'd suggest that search.cpan.org will have a new option 'direct' in 
> addition to module, dist, author and all. So that 
> http://search.cpan.org/search?query=Apache::Request&mode=direct will 
> take me direct to the distro containing this package?

Ick!.  /search is for "searching" not for direct links. Any direct link 
should have a different URL IMO.

I will add this type of link to my todo list.

Graham.